Both sections and items can have an icon, which is specified using the `icon` attribute. Using icons improves the aesthetics of your UI and makes the app more intuitive to use. Dashy supports multiple different icon providers, usage instructions for which are explained here.
If the service is hosted under a local IP, then Dashy will attempt to find the favicon from `http://[ip]/favicon.ico`. This has two issues, favicons are not always hosted at the same location for every service, and often the default favicon is sometimes low resolution. Therefore for remote services, by default an API is used to return a high-quality icon for almost any online service.
The default favicon API is [allesedv.com](https://favicon.allesedv.com/), but several other API's are supported. To change the API used, under `appConfig`, set `faviconApi` to one of the following values:
You can also force Dashy to always get favicons from the root of the domain, and not use an external service, by setting `appConfig.faviconApi` to `local`, although you may face the issue explained above.
To use a different favicon API for certain items, then set `icon: favicon-[api]`, e.g. `favicon-clearbit`
If for a given service none of the APIs work in your situation, and nor does local, then the best option is to find the path of the services logo or favicon, and set the icon to the URL of the raw image. For example, `icon: https://monitoring.local/faviconx128.png`- you can find this path using the browser dev tools.
You can use any [Font Awesome Icon](https://fontawesome.com/icons) simply by specifying it's identifier. This is in the format of `[category] [name]` and can be found on the page for that icon on the Font Awesome site. For example: `fas fa-rocket`, `fab fa-monero` or `fas fa-unicorn`.
Font-Awesome has a wide variety of free icons, but you can also use their pro icons if you have a membership. To do so, you need to specify your license key under: `appConfig.fontAwesomeKey`. This is usually a 10-digit string, for example `13014ae648`.
[SimpleIcons.org](https://simpleicons.org/) is a collection of 2000+ high quality, free and open source brand and logo SVG icons. Usage of which is very similar to font-awesome icons. First find the glyph you want to use on the [website](https://simpleicons.org/), then just set your icon the the simple icon slug, prefixed with `si-`.
To uses a unique and programmatically generated icon for a given service just set `icon: generative`. This is particularly useful when you have a lot of similar services with a different IP or port, and no specific icon. These icons are generated with [DiceBear](https://avatars.dicebear.com/) (or [Evatar](https://evatar.io/) for fallback), and use a hash of the services domain/ ip for entropy, so each domain will have a unique icon.
You can use almost any emoji as an icon for items or sections. You can specify the emoji either by pasting it directly, using it's unicode ( e.g. `'U+1F680'`) or shortcode (e.g. `':rocket:'`). You can find these codes for any emoji using [Emojipedia](https://emojipedia.org/) (near the bottom of emoji each page), or for a quick reference to emoji shortcodes, check out [emojis.ninja](https://emojis.ninja/) by @nomanoff.
The [dashboard-icons](https://github.com/WalkxCode/dashboard-icons) repo by [@WalkxCode](https://github.com/WalkxCode) provides a comprehensive collection of 360+ high-quality PNG icons for commonly self-hosted services. Dashy natively supports these icons, and you can use them just by specifying the icon name (without extension) preceded by `hl-`. See [here](https://github.com/WalkxCode/dashboard-icons/tree/master/png) for a full list of all available icons. Note that these are fetched and cached strait from GitHub, so if you require offline access, the [Local Icons](#local-icons) method may be a better option for you.
Dashy also supports 5000+ [material-design-icons](https://github.com/Templarian/MaterialDesign). To use these, first find the name/ slug for your icon [here](https://dev.materialdesignicons.com/icons), and then prefix is with `mdi-`.
You can also set an icon by passing in a valid URL pointing to the icons location. For example `icon: https://i.ibb.co/710B3Yc/space-invader-x256.png`, this can be in .png, .jpg or .svg format, and hosted anywhere (local or remote) - so long as it's accessible from where you are hosting Dashy. The icon will be automatically scaled to fit, however loading in a lot of large icons may have a negative impact on performance, especially if you visit Dashy from new devices often.
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## Local Icons
You may also want to store your icons locally, bundled within Dashy so that there is no reliance on outside services. This can be done by putting the icons within Dashy's `./public/item-icons/` directory. If you are using Docker, then the easiest option is to map a volume from your host system, for example: `-v /local/image/directory:/app/public/item-icons/`. To reference an icon stored locally, just specify it's name and extension. For example, if my icon was stored in `/app/public/item-icons/maltrail.png`, then I would just set `icon: maltrail.png`.
You can also use sub-folders within the `item-icons` directory to keep things organized. You would then specify an icon with it's folder name slash image name. For example: `networking/monit.png`
The following websites provide good-quality, free icon sets. To use any of these icons, either copy the link to the raw icon (it should end in `.svg` or `.png`) and paste it as your `icon`, or download and save the icons in `/public/item-icons` / mapped Docker volume. Full credit to the authors, please see the licenses for each service for usage and copyright information.
If you are a student, then you can get free access to premium icons on [Icon Scout](https://education.github.com/pack/redeem/iconscout-student) or [Icons8](https://icons8.com/github-students) using the [GitHub Student Pack](https://education.github.com/pack).
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## Notes
If you are using icons from an external source, these will be fetched on initial page load automatically, if and when needed. But combining icons from multiple services may have a negative impact on performance.
You can improve load speeds, by downloading your required icons, and serving them locally. Scaling icons to the minimum required dimensions (e.g. 128x128 or 64x64) will also greatly improve application load times.
